Problems Accessing Videos and Lecture Files, August 1
We're aware that a good number of students in online courses are currently having problems viewing course lecture videos and downloading lecture PDFs. In almost all cases, someone clicks a link to play a lecture and gets the message "HTML5: video not found" or clicks on a link to a PDF and receives a "Access Denied" message. This problem began early this morning and seems to be increasing in frequency. Files that were accessible without issue just yesterday are now having these problems.
We've requested that the team at Amazon who manages CloudFront -- the system by which we distribute lecture videos and PDFs -- look into the problem. We are still waiting to hear back from them about what is going wrong.
We've found that Safari and Internet Explorer are much less likely to have this problem than Chrome or Firefox. Until this problem is resolved, you can try one of those two browsers but you may still run into the "Access Denied" message on some PDF files.
We're very sorry about this. We know it's causing many of you a great deal of frustration, and we're trying to get the problem fixed as quickly as we can.
Update 11:04pm — The problems with CloudFront began resolve around 9pm Eastern, and as of 11pm Eastern, we were not seeing errors loading any of the many lectures and PDFs we tried to load. There may be a handful of lingering problems throughout the night. If you do run into "File Not Found" or "Access Denied" errors, please try to reload the page and see if that resolves your problem. You can also contact CTL Help with the precise lecture and section with which you are having problems and they will see what they can do.
Again, we apologize for the inconvenience and frustration this has caused.